


No Price Too High to Pay (For Freedom or for Love)

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 04:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21570838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: Moriarty is drawn to men who act against their instincts.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/James Moriarty
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14
Collections: Holmestice Exchange - Winter 2019





	No Price Too High to Pay (For Freedom or for Love)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trobadora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trobadora/gifts).



In the hills above Mieringen, the air is crisp and thin and filled with the roar of falling water. All that long night they sit and talk. The dark seems to bring the words out of him. It is like that, with men who have spent too much time among the Ones who came from below (and who know their inclinations). In the bright light of day, they are daring to the point of recklessness, because they have nothing to fear there. Everything they fear happens in the dark: underground, or in the murky depths from which Her Majesty emerged.

For Sebastian, the nights are long. He will never step over a sewer grate, but walks around it instead, with his eyes carefully averted. He can never be prevailed upon to use the Underground. Sherlock Holmes is different: his creeping distaste for the Ones who came from below is obvious, yet he seeks them out. This is of particular interest to Moriarty; he is drawn to men who act against their instincts.

“I foresee destruction,” Holmes says, speaking not to Moriarty but to his long, surprisingly delicate hands, clasped in front of him. “We each have unique and complementary talents. We are working at opposing purposes. The likely result is mutual destruction.”

Put like that, of course, the situation seems rather simple. _Elementary_ , Moriarty would have said, when he was young and arrogant. Yet the older he gets, the more complicated things seem.

Here, in this improbable place, with the waters below them and the damp grey cliffs above. Here, the story spills out of Holmes as if he is afraid of the silence.

Moriarty listens.

…

They feed on pain. This in turn engenders madness, and they feed on that, too. Do not try to think of something else. Do not try to block it out, his father tells him. They are too strong for that. You must accept it. This is the price you pay. You must accept the things they put in your head, resign yourself to them.

At twelve, when his more aristocratic cousins are preparing for their first’s day’s shooting, his father takes him down to London, and in a warehouse down by the docks, the air filled with the heaviness of saltwater and rotting fishguts and blood, there is held captive a writhing half-human thing with a rubbery face and roving eyes two centuries old. Sherlock can feel it, can feel its cruel appraisal of him. It is too terrible for words. A man with one side of his face bone white watches, a revolver in his hand, as Sherlock’s father shoots this abomination with an 8-bore elephant gun.

There is a roar that repeats and seems to hang in the thick air, stretching every moment into something intolerable. Gouts of thick green blood and grey brain matter seem to float, suspended, and still there is that terrible shrieking, and when his father turns to him, face flecked with ichor, he realises that his throat is hoarse with screaming.

…

At school Holmes is ridiculed for his height, because his father is a seditionist, for his cleverness.

(Moriarty suspects that he is ridiculed for something else, as well, a thing that goes carefully unremarked).

When Holmes is sixteen, the housekeeper goes into his father’s study one morning and finds him lying half across the desk with his brains blown out. Mycroft, who has already distinguished himself at University, by eloquently declaring his undying loyalty for the Queen and for his extraordinary faculty for figures—in that order—is positive that it is murder. Sherlock already knows enough, _sees_ enough, to know that it isn’t.

He takes up his place at _____ , the shabbiest of the Oxford colleges, and the less said of that the better. The dons are dogmatic fools. It seems to Holmes that his fellow students are either drunken aesthetes with political pretensions, or pale, scurrying little men who think being conventional will keep them safe. He reads a lot, when he isn’t busy committing treason.

He is sent down in the Michaelmas term of his second year, not because they (rightly) suspect him of Restorationist sympathies, but because he screams at night, and paces up and down the room, and neglects his work to go for long punishing walks in the countryside, and it is decided that it might just be easier for all concerned if he leaves. If he wasn’t his father’s son, it is likely he would have just been rusticated. If they knew who he really was, he would have been fed to the Ones who came from below. He packs himself a single suitcase, leaving most of his books behind. He cannot afford to carry too much. He leaves his name behind, too.

…

When he moves into London in the Year of Our Lady 692, that being AD1876, he has a much-brushed suit, three shirts, a suitcase full of notebooks, a single pair of boots, and a revolver. Mycroft can occasionally be prevailed upon for money, but this requires that evasive measures be taken: he sends a carefully-worded and ambiguous-sounding telegram to Mycroft’s ministerial offices, signing it _Sigerson_ , and they will meet for five or ten minutes, on a bench on Hampstead Heath, or in the back row at a music hall. _I wish you would eat more_ , Mycroft says. _I wish you would smoke less_. For these small acts of devotion—for honouring the promise he made to their father—Mycroft would be sacrificed for Her Majesty’s pleasure, if anybody knew.

Holmes can break the cipher used by the navy to send coded telegrams to the Admiralty. He can tell from what part of the country a man or woman spent their formative years based on the way they pronounce a handful of words. He can identify at a single searching glance a gambling addict, a pickpocket, a murderer. He can deceive a creature with royal blood. What he cannot do is legitimate work. So he becomes an informal private enquiry agent, often to petty criminals. Many of his clients are treacherous and predictable. Some of them are good people. After all, they are not the real criminals.

He tracks down traitors and locates absconded husbands. He finds lost heirlooms and provides protection for nervous businessmen. He helps a man called John Clay, the heir to a dead title, to plan a quite elaborate, neat little bank robbery. He watches, safe and anonymous, as a tall, stooped man with thinning hair and a cruel face is shown into the empty bank vault by a police inspector. He has the slightly stunned look of a clever man who has been bested. Holmes smiles to himself. He has so little opportunity to exercise his talents.

…

“Did you think me an adversary, then?”

“I was already contending with…”

With Them, with the mark that They leave on the mind. Moriarty is almost offended. The impression of a bootheel, a wisp of black tobacco, taproom gossip about a thin man with a cultivated accent who could fight like a mad dog; he has been following the thread of Holmes’ offenses against Her Majesty for years now.

This obscure, impossible chase gives him energy. Nothing else gives him as much pleasure. He knows that this… _obsession_ somehow reflects on the barrenness of his life, on the perversity of his inclinations, but he doesn’t care. They say that true will always serves Her Majesty. Moriarty trusts his mind; he lets it lead him where it will.

…

With the fee Holmes charged for the bank job, he could have lived quietly for a couple of years. But he does not live quietly; he spends six months tracking a minor Bohemian nobleman with a taste for flesh and a passion for cards. In the guise of a dissipated wastrel Holmes gambles in Monte Carlo, making stupid and extravagant bets, and by the time the creature arrives to summer there he has established himself as a fixture at the bar. He spends endless, tedious hours drinking weak whisky and water and making stupid small talk, and he watches the thing—the cast of its head, the shape of its hands—until he can follow it through the dark. One cool summer night it decides to walk home, and in a dark alleyway not far from the ocean, his head full of the smell of seawater, Holmes empties a six-shot revolver into the back of its misshapen skull and drops the gun at his feet. By daybreak he is in the glorious Republic of France with nothing but the clothes on his back, his pockets full of francs. 

That was the summer that he first resorted to cocaine, merely as a means of clarifying and stimulating the mind. He rents a small room on the Left Bank of the Seine—the waters of that river being free of things that crawl, things that squat in the shadows—and sits through the long nights with his throat dry and his heart beating hard, filling the room with pipe smoke. Shadows crawl across the wall with an inexorable steadiness that makes him think of the Ones from below.

…

Moriarty has dabbled, also, with a hypodermic syringe and a weak cocaine solution. It gave him a strangely ambiguous feeling, sitting up at night, his thoughts racing, watching Sebastian snore in the basket chair on the other side of the fire. It made him feel as if there was an answer just out of reach. He is careful not to let it become a habit; Her Majesty is noted for her intolerance toward human weakness.  
  


…

“Where did you live?”

Holmes knocks his pipe out against his boot and goes about packing it again, retrieving a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and skilfully loading it into the bowl with slightly shaking fingers. He shrugs, as if this question is immaterial.

“I rented a room occasionally. I slept in the hayloft of a family with Restorationist sympathies, for a summer. A woman called Irene gave me a bed.”

Moriarty wants to ask whether or not she shared it, but this is both intrusive and outside the scope of his inquiry.

“How many have you killed?”

Holmes is silent for what feels like a long time, although it is probably less than a minute. Moriarty listens in the dark, to the rushing of the water. The creatures leave behind them involuntary recollections; even the smell of freshwater can be intolerable.

“Seven,” he says. “And two men.”

Fascinating, the thought of killing for a cause. Moriarty would only kill to furnish an end. He would never contribute to a long, useless campaign with no end in sight, as Sherlock Holmes and the doctor have done. He considers himself too clever for that.

…

An entry from the _Who’s Who in New Albion and Great Victoriana_ for 1880:

Siger Sherrinford Holmes, 1820-1870, noted subversive who died in an unfortunate accident, as Her Majesty willed it. Married Violet Holmes née Vernet (1825-1852), issue:

Mycroft Sherrinford, b. 1845. Enjoyed a distinguished career at Oxford, before entering into Her Majesty’s service as an assistant to Her Accounting Office. Currently Vice-Secretary of Her Secret Service. In his leisure time he is the secretary and founder of the Diogenes Club.

Sherlock William, b. 1852. Whereabouts unknown since 1874.

…

It’s not as if Moriarty can’t afford the rent on a set of rooms. But when he sees Sebastian for the first time, he seems so _pathetic_ , and yet he also has the look of a man who would kill, and it is this combination of violence and vulnerability that tells Moriarty that he could be a companion both useful and interesting.

A first in the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos has some cachet, and before he’s been in London for long, he has made a quite reasonable reputation for himself, making discreet enquiries on behalf of distinguished people. A discreet letter, here and there, directed at the more incompetent members of the Metropolitan Police, and he has fashioned a career for himself as a ‘consulting detective,’ a brain for hire.

It helps that he is unfailingly loyal to the Queen. As loyal as he is to anybody, that is.

…

There’s a doctor well known among Restorationists. He has rooms on the cheap end of Harley Street. Holmes knocks on his door at a quarter to six one evening, lightheaded, a sticky hand pressed to his side. A slight man with sandy hair answers the door with the look of an unvoiced question on his lips, but when he sees the desperate, half-dazed look on Holmes’ face he says _oh, you better come this way_ , and ushers him down a short corridor and into a plain, neat room that smells of surgical spirit. He has a limp. It is of long standing and seems not to bother him unduly; he has worn his bootheels unevenly, and he moves with a sort of quiet purpose. Holmes likes him straight away.

The doctor unbuttons Holmes’ shirt with brisk hands and clicks his tongue with disapproval when he sees the wound. He smells of soap and starch. Holmes breathes deeply, listening to the quietness of the house around him, the small noises of the doctor gathering his instruments.

As he stitches the wound the doctor says, “Are you the one they call Sherry?”

“Yes,” Holmes says. There are other things he could say: your mother was Scottish. You are a widower. Your small rooms and worn clothes reflect not a lack of medical skill but a reluctance to pursue overdue accounts where there is little money there to be had. Your clothes are military neat and your fingers bear the scars of infections caught from battlefield wounds. In another life, were he not half-delirious from pain and the beginning of a fever, Holmes would try to impress this man. But he is too tired. He has been running for too long.

“But my name is Sherlock Holmes,” he says.

“John Watson,” the doctor says.

Watson takes him to the spare room, gives him a teaspoon of paregoric, and helps him pull off his boots. He sleeps. After three stupid, mumbling days of fever, Holmes comes down to the sitting room in the evening and takes his place by the fire. Watson folds the newspaper he’s reading and tosses it skilfully onto the nearby table, then stretches his feet out toward the fire with a barely suppressed groan.

“Are you the one who killed that Bohemian crown prince in St. John’s Wood? Wilhelm something?”

“Yes,” Holmes says, careful to keep his voice steady. “And I looked into its eyes as I did it. We had personal business, that creature and I.”

“I heard that he truly loved women,” Watson says, “But a little too roughly and indiscriminately.”

“I do not think them capable of love,” Holmes says, pulling his pipe out of his pocket. He can feel the stitches pull at the delicate skin of his stomach. He thinks of a contralto from the New World singing scales at the piano. 

“The housekeeper has made a pork pie for tea,” Watson says, businesslike. “Would you dine with me? To my eye you look to be about ten pounds underweight.”

Not to mention drug-addicted and half mad. Holmes takes his place at Watson’s dining table, which is cluttered with correspondence and medical articles. In a sense, he never leaves. It is the first home he has ever had.

…

A skilled housekeeper and a neat set of rooms on Baker Street. A pleasant view of the street; he can see his clients before they even knock on the door. A monograph on the binomial equations. Supper on a tray by the fire. A neat but ultimately disappointing problem which involves a loathsome countess, a goose, and a blue jewel. Retort stand and Bunsen burner. The personal column of the _Times_. A monograph on the consistency and appearance of different tobacco ashes. Sipping brandy by the fire, the house quiet around him. Sometimes, late at night, Moriarty paces back and forth in the sitting room and thinks of treason. It would at least be more interesting.

…

As the doctor butchers Prince Franz Drago, the tall man—the one who lured the Prince into this insalubrious house—stands and watches, knocking his pipe out into the hearth. They leave together, the taller man at the right of the limping doctor.

Things Moriarty knows about the tall man: he was educated at public school and went to Oxford—he is 90% sure of this, which makes it something much more probable than a guess. He smokes strong black tobacco. When Moriarty meets him in Drury Lane, in the guise of a theatrical promoter, he sees that he is a man half a decade younger than himself, with dark hair, a long face, tired blue eyes, and hypodermic needle marks on his left wrist.

It is not a relief to have the answer; he feels as he always does at these times a sort of black resignation, disappointment. How simple it all seems in hindsight. But then the tall man slips out of his hands.

As Sebastian predicts, Her Majesty’s Police close every port and train station in Albion looking for a tall dark-haired man and a shorter man with a limp, and although they waylay hundreds of innocent travellers in Her name, they find no trace of the tall man and the doctor.

The next day, Moriarty puts on a pair of baggy canvas trousers and a greasy jacket, and, mindful of the tall man’s gentle admonition of the lacuna in his previous disguise—his never-smoked pipe—he hides his soft hands, distinctly not those of a sailor, in his pockets. For three weeks he roams the rookery of St Giles, drinking in pubs, standing on street corners, even pretending to sleep leaning against a rope in a dismal doss house. Finally, he sees a half-burnt copy of _Her Majesty’s London Times_ in the incinerator outside an incredibly mean-looking hovel, a two-story house a single room wide that he knows will house three or four families. Moriarty doubts that any of them read the _Times_.

He sits in the little pub across the road and down a bit, for the better part of eight or nine days. He thinks a lot, of tall men and sedition and bullets and madness, and one evening he goes home and looks through his commonplace book, then takes down his copy of _Who’s Who_.

One night the tall man walks past the pub, swiftly, in the gloaming, with a hat pulled down over his face and a half-grown beard, and Moriarty throws down a couple of coins and follows him. In a place where the street is quieter, he calls out, just loud enough for the tall man to hear, “I believe that your name is Sherlock Holmes.”

Sherlock Holmes whirls around, and on his face is the look of a man who has just seen a ghost. It is all the confirmation that Moriarty needs.

…

“You have less intellectual development than I might have expected, given the circumstances,” Holmes says, a wry smile on his face. “It is very dangerous to finger a loaded revolver in your pocket.”

Moriarty takes Sebastian’s revolver out of his pocket, keeping it carefully pointed at the ground, and he shakes the bullets out of the cylinder and puts them in his pocket. That being done, Sherlock Holmes surprises him by whipping a Webley revolver out from somewhere inside his coat and unloading it as well.

“I must commend you,” Sherlock Holmes says. “It cannot have been easy, finding me.”

There is a brief silence. Moriarty speaks first. “Everything that I have to say has already crossed your mind.”

“Then perhaps my answer has crossed yours,” Holmes says.

There will be no truce, no compromise. “You stand fast?”

“Yes,” Holmes says, his voice flat. Moriarty had expected, given the long-windedness of Holmes’ written correspondence, the exhibitionistic brilliance of it, his unconventional, intense mathematical thinking, that he would be talkative. Yet he is remarkably reticent, his eyes dull. Whatever he has done, he has paid for it with his genius.

“Well,” Moriarty says, his voice carefully breezy, “Let me inform you that if you plan to bring destruction upon me, I would gladly visit it upon you.”

He turns to leave, and as he does so he feels a hand at his elbow, pulling him off balance, and before he knows it Sherlock Holmes has him pinned against the wall, an elbow to his spine. Up close he has a smell of warm wool and pipe smoke. It reminds him of Cambridge, and that prosaic detail sets off something at the base of his stomach, something warm and yet somehow unwelcome.

“Mr. Moriarty,” Sherlock Holmes says, his voice ragged and knowing, “You have paid me a compliment. Let me pay you one in return by saying that, by our dead King, if I could be assured of the former eventuality, I would gladly accept the latter.”

“I can promise you one, but not the other,” Moriarty says, his cheek kissing cold brick, and then Sherlock Holmes backs away into the dark, and he is left standing on the street, breathing hard. His dick twitches; he can still feel that hand at his elbow, hear that thin voice speaking blasphemy.

He considers expediting matters by contacting Holmes’ brother, but a mere consulting detective seems quite expendable compared with someone so indispensable to the government. He decides to wait; he knows this matter between them is unfinished, and he knows that Holmes knows it too. Yet it takes him days to wonder why he didn’t just shoot the man. It is what the police would have done.

He tells Sebastian none of this.

…

The people of Dartmoor are troubled by a creature which roams the moor at night, ripping the heads off of moor ponies and setting dogs to frenzied barking. Two men encounter it, walking home across Wistman’s Wood on a night bright with moonlight. One is driven to a raving madness and the other is found with half his face torn off. The incumbent squire has developed certain tastes.

Holmes wanders the moor alone for almost a month, wearing worn tweeds and carrying a fishing rod; the locals take him for a harmless eccentric (perhaps that’s what he would have been, if things were different). The thing that calls itself the squire is found one morning, face-down on the Yew Alley that leads from Baskerville Hall to the moor. It has been split open from belly to gullet.

Holmes is thin and grey and exhausted, worn thin from a month of sleeping on the ground and wandering in the mist. Before he leaves Baskerville Hall, he goes inside, his hands sticky and shaking, takes a portrait down from the wall and roughly cuts it out of the frame. He leaves the filleting knife, dark green with drying blood, buried an inch deep in the ancient mantlepiece.

He goes to Paris and presents the portrait to a young man of his acquaintance called Henry Baskerville, whose grandfather offended the sensibilities of Her Majesty and was rewarded with death. Things seem to catch up with him rather, then, all those foggy days, and when Watson arrives (from business which remains carefully unremarked upon, in this account) he is lying on Baskerville’s couch, in a state of black, dumb collapse.

They take the boat-train back to London. Clearing customs at Calais and again at Dover is just about all Holmes can bear: the defiant sneers of the French, the guttural shouts of Her Majesty’s Guards, the endless demands for papers.

Watson murmurs, in the confessional quiet of the train carriage, “You and I both know there is a finite number of times you can do this before it ends you.”

“If we both know it,” Holmes says, “Then why bother mentioning it?”

…

Moriarty is dressed in the mode of a Hyde Park dandy gone underground. He does the rounds of the East End opium dens, appearing to smoke far more than he actually does, listening for half-articulated fragments of gossip. Moriarty is well known in these places, in this disguise, and every now and then he leads a conversation, gently alters the topic, and at these times he imagines himself to be at the centre of a web, gently tugging at strings that stretch all over London, and all over Albion, too.

He has made his way down to that part of the East End where the windows have no glass and the faces seem to not always fit within the confines of the skull. He is in an establishment called Mr _______’s, where any vice can be accommodated for a price, and it is here that he finally indulges himself. When he lets himself out the back door and into the yard, the heaviness of his steps is unfeigned. As he walks past the privy and into the greasy, dark lane, he hears from the shadows the scrape of a bootsole against cobblestone, the dry click of the hammer being pulled back on a revolver. In that strange way that the nervous system has, his sobriety seems to return in an instant. 

“ _Professor_ Moriarty.”

A soft, high voice, a dark shape four or five inches taller. Holmes. Moriarty feels his pulse quicken, observing this simple physiological fact with detachment.

“I must congratulate you in turn for finding _me_ ,” he says, his voice steady. Moriarty puts his hand into his jacket pocket and puts his finger around the trigger of his revolver. He could gutshoot Holmes in an instant, and he would bleed out, right here, scarlet on the grey stone, and it would be over.

“I have friends here, too. The sight of a pound note in an establishment like this sends tongues wagging.”

There is something remote in his voice. Moriarty wonders if he might be under the influence of some narcotic. There would be no judgement on his part.

“Is that why you are here, Mr Holmes? To deliver a lesson in subterfuge?”

“To deliver a message,” Holmes says. “The game is afoot.”

Something soft falls at Moriarty’s feet. There is the flare of a match, and Moriarty sees Holmes’ face for a second, frowning pale as he lights his pipe, and then he is gone. Moriarty takes a sweaty hand off his revolver and strikes a match of his own. The thing at his feet is a hideous lump of newspaper soaked in emerald green. There is the smell of old blood.

_All things serve Her Majesty_ , they say. Once, Moriarty was sure that this was true.

…

A country house in Sussex. An envelope containing five small seashells. Congealing gouts of emerald on the ceiling. A surgeon’s knife embedded in the mantlepiece. Outside, there are the footprints of a tall man, pacing back and forth, and a set of footprints made by a slower, limping man. A man skilled with a knife.

Moriarty is in the sitting room at Baker Street at midnight, still in his travel-worn clothes, his feet stretched out toward the fire, listening alternately to Sebastian’s stertorous snores and to the traffic passing by on the street outside, thinking.

“We are entangled with each other, you and I,” he murmurs into his brandy.

“Mmm?” Sebastian has woken in that sudden and complete way of soldiers, immediately alert.

“How is your shoulder these days, Sebastian? I know they once called you one of the best shots in Albion.”

“It gets better every day,” Sebastian says. “But I suppose now for the sake of honesty I must demote myself to the best shot in London.”

…

The current Prince of Welsh New Albion is twenty years old, a half-human with six eyes and a taste for the flesh of children (which goes carefully unremarked). He is his mother’s favourite. She bestows on him her guttural, whispered blessings, sweet nothings that are impossible to pronounce with a human tongue.

He is found at the country house of the Duke of Brittania. The body is in the stables, beside an empty brandy snifter which smells of opium. His head is split open by a shotgun; the splatter pattern is entirely distinctive. It was at least five men who did it, among them a tall man and a man who favours his right leg. There is a piece of notepaper pinned to the Prince’s belly, with a small knife designed for the surgical excision of cataracts. _Rache_ , it says.

When Moriarty is brought before Her Majesty for an audience, to discuss this crime and the failure of he and Her Majesty’s Police to detect and prevent it, he fears her. He senses for the first time the precariousness of his position. The small, operative details of the crime do not interest her. She wants flesh.

…

On the platform at Victoriana station, Holmes half-carries Watson onto the train. As it pulls out of the station, gathering speed, he can see Moriarty standing at the end of the platform, bent over with exertion. Holmes knows that it will not be long before they are run to ground.

At Dover, in the line for the voyage across the Albion Channel, he glimpses a man wearing handmade Lobb shoes dressed improbably as a Roman Catholic priest, and he knows that he has successfully lured his predator. The ‘priest’ is on the train to Bern, too, along with a dark-eyed man carrying a violin case in a rough hand that has never so much as played a C major scale.

When they arrive at Mieringen in the early evening, he falls asleep face down on the bed, in his clothes. When he awakes, it is a bright, clean, cold Swiss day, and he smokes a pipe by the window, watching the midday bustle of the town. He picks at his lunch tray, watching Watson eat heartily. He dreamt last night, of something impossibly large dragging him down into the depths, his eyes incapable of regarding it completely, his lungs bursting. That drowning feeling rarely leaves him, now, even when he is awake.

“I thought a walk to the falls,” he says.

…

Sebastian cleans his rifle. It is an Albion Army service rifle. His movements are practiced and automatic. Sebastian tells him that many captured Albion Lee-Metford .303 rifles are now in the hands of the Afghan cave-folk, so it is just as likely that a soldier of Albion will be shot by such a rifle as it is that he will look down its sights.

“What next?” he says, as he works linseed oil into the woodwork.

“A gentle stroll down to the waterfall, for me, and the same for you, followed by a short climb.”

It is not Her Majesty’s will that has led him here, but his own. For the moment, those two interests coincide. And yet Moriarty has always found blind loyalty to be an overrated quality in men. It is not a quality at all possessed by the creatures.

…

When Sherlock Holmes comes into view, clad somewhat improbably in the travelling clothes of a country gentleman, he is alone. His face is lined with fatigue, and he leans heavily on an alpenstock. He comes forward until he and Moriarty are about six feet apart, and then he leans the stick against a large boulder, takes out his pipe, and lights it with a rather theatrical flourish.

“Where is the doctor?”

“This is between you and I, is it not? Have we not reached a crisis, the two of us?”

“If you say so.”

“Then call off your guard dog.”

Moriarty lets his hands hang loose by his side for a moment. He could end it here, right now. And yet now that he has Holmes in his power, he feels that familiar sense of sinking disappointment. And so he raises his right arm, in a fist, in a pre-arranged signal. Moran fires a single shot that scars the boulder to Holmes’ right.

“That was mere melodrama on his part,” Moriarty says. “He will leave now.”

Sherlock Holmes sits down, then, his back against the boulder, his knees drawn to his chest, ten feet from the roaring water.

“You are curious, are you not? Let us speak the truth.”

“You mean Restorationist propaganda?”

“If you say so,” Holmes says, mildly, and he starts to talk.

…

  
“One matter remains: mutual destruction.” Moriarty is sitting against the boulder, now, shivering in the pre-dawn chill, and Holmes is pacing back and forth as he talks.

“For one or both of us, yes.”

Holmes laughs. It is a strange and disquieting noise. “I should think both.”

Moriarty flicks a small stone along the path, watches it tumble over the edge. “Why are you laughing?”

“You could have killed me twice or three times over. In London, and here. I would die for the Restoration, as my father did, and yet you would not die for your Queen. You cannot solve this. I am a curiosity to you. That is why you have not attempted to destroy me, and why I in turn have not attempted to visit destruction upon you. Also, it is gratifying to find somebody who so thoroughly appreciates my methods."

Moriarty says nothing. It is so absurdly simple. Sherlock Holmes stops pacing, then, and then he comes over and sits next to Moriarty, on the cold, damp ground. He takes his cold pipe out of his pocket, fills and lights it, and they continue to sit in silence.

The sky is a little lighter when Holmes shifts beside him and places a cold hand on the side of his face. He pulls Moriarty’s face down to his and kisses him. Moriarty does not pull away. He can taste tobacco. He does nothing.

“Trust your mind, James Moriarty,” Holmes says, his voice soft. “The only difference between you and I is that I have nothing left to lose.”

Moriarty is so stunned that he lets him leave, without uttering another word. 

…

On the train from Bern to Paris, Moriarty curtly tells Sebastian to take his own compartment. He wants to be alone. He thinks of the tedious little puzzles awaiting him back in London. None of them bring him any joy.

Holmes will be stronger, when he reappears in London. Sebastian will be stronger, then, too. His blind loyalty to Her Majesty grows daily, as well. 

Moriarty puts his fingers to his lips, thinking. Sherlock Holmes: the worthiest adversary a man could have; brilliant, worn, frighteningly intense. He realises now that he regards the man with nothing less than respect.

Let Her Majesty’s will be damned, Moriarty thinks, and either this blasphemous thought

(Holmes)

or the headlong pleasure of the game sets his heart beating, so he can feel it.


End file.
